Authors: Jeffrey Thomas
“Second floor. Nineteen Cobble Plaza. Money, huh?”
“Rich Earth family. Yeah, go see Kate. Tell her what I did. Tell her about the boy, what he told you he was. And Johnny? Tell her that I still love her. Will you?”
“Yeah, yeah – I’ll tell her.”
“John. I am sorry about the wife. Truly. It was brash. It was stupid. And it was selfish.”
“It was a thrill you couldn’t resist. Sleeping with your best friend’s wife. I think you used all that dung about concern for me just as an excuse, Josh. Maybe we should truth-scan you on that, while we’re at it.”
“We’ll talk about it again another day, John. I can see you aren’t inclined to believe me now, and there are more pressing matters.”
“Well, you got that much right. I’ll go ask them now if they can do that recording...”
“Insist, John! Insist!”
“I’ll see ya.” And with that, Bell left his old friend standing at the humming barrier, his eyes glowing eerily with its reflected light as he anxiously watched him depart.
-3-
Bell’s hovercar rode two feet above the street, and it would seem to require a stronger than usual repulsor field to hold it aloft, but the huge, heavy-looking replica Edsel was actually constructed of lightweight, durable ceramic. In hover mode, its wheels tucked up into their cavities. When Bell had first seen the car, its amphibian face and distinctive grille had won him over immediately. When he found out about the original’s reputation as a fluke, well, that was only the icing on the cake. He loved the monstrosity.
The original, no matter how controversial in its day, had not possessed the monitor screen on its dash which Bell had had installed, and spoke to now. Graf’s Choom face filled the screen.
“I’m taking the recording now,” the forensics tech reported, “but the chief would only agree to go back a day, for now, to record the crime as it took place.”
“Good enough.”
“You don’t really expect to see anything like Kaddish described...”
“Of course not. But we’ll see what he did do. Clear up a couple of mysteries, like why he really fired into the corner, and how those marks in the carpet got there. If nothing more, it will prove his guilt in court and save the tax payers from footing a long trial.”
“It wouldn’t have been a long trial even without his memories. He admits he killed them, and we have a truth scan. The scan says everything he told us was straight. At least, that he believes everything he told us is straight. He really believes he chased a monster into the corner, and put a few slugs into it. He might be totally burnt, but he’s not lying to us.”
“Any drugs in his system? Absinthe?”
“No sign of him ever taking that. He’s clean.”
“I wonder if this Kate Redgrove is on something. I don’t know what she did to Kaddish’s mind. Although Kaddish felt he had to destroy the cult, his delusions and theirs are based on the same belief in the same things. Just that he opposes the beliefs, and they embrace them.”
“Mm. Oh -- hey, you should put the news on. John. They’ve lost all contact with Luna and Mars, now, too. There were a few panicky-sounding transmissions, and then they got cut off. Whatever’s blocking Earth communications seems to be spreading outward.”
“Jesus. Did any of the transmissions hint what’s going on?”
“Somebody was saying something about a gaseous fog everywhere...a cloud. ‘A cloud with mouths’. Lots of mouths. Crazy stuff. Creepy to hear it, though; they played a bit of the transmission on the air. These people were really scared. I don’t know what they actually saw, but...reminded me of a recording I heard once of a shuttle going into a crash landing. Gave me the chills.”
“Wow,” Bell murmured inadequately.
“Anyhow, I’ll get back to you when I have a look at his recording.”
“Mm,” Bell grunted.
He stopped at an intersection, his vehicle idling but his mind hurtling on ahead, though it wasn’t sure of direction, maybe not even of destination. All around him, the colony city of Punktown loomed; skyscrapers slate gray or mirror bright, as ornamented as gothic cathedrals or as smooth and featureless as obelisks. Smaller buildings with skins of brick or tile, bright pebbled mosaic or pastel stucco, crowded around the bases of the titans. Piercing the ash sky were minarets both glittering new or tarnished and with masonry crumbling. There were plastic gargoyles leering down at him from on high, like taunting demons. There was a bronze angel lifting a sword above its androgynous head, atop a dome of verdigris green. Elegant Art Deco scallops and tiers, and structures of metal like giant primitive engines, grease-stained and covered in incomprehensible mechanical detail.
It was a many-faced tribute to the power of ingenuity, the perseverance of living things, of survival in a universe mindlessly hostile toward life, beneficial to life apparently only by accident. So many races, so many varied interpretations on life, had come together here -- not always harmoniously, by any means, but successfully -- to erect a temple of sorts to the god of Life itself. Surrounded by these colossal edifices, watching the teeming masses on the sidewalks, the hordes of vehicles on ground level and even in the air, it was hard to believe that Earth -- its cities far greater still than this one -- could be under any kind of devastating threat. Let alone the
Armageddon, the Doomsday, that Kaddish predicted like one of those scripture-quoting fanatics who seemed to haunt cities everywhere. There was history here, behind every building’s style of construction and ornament, telling of the civilizations, the cultures, the religions that had brought them here to this world -- like solid foundations that were built on a bed of time. This was not a fragile scene. This was strength. Only Nature was stronger, and was that even true, when these beings had drained many a verdant planet dry and turned many an ocean black to reach this pinnacle of power? What natural cataclysm could have befallen Earth that its inhabitants couldn’t foresee far ahead, and take measures to divert or repel? And yet something had happened, hadn’t it? But what?
Bell reminded himself that most of the cultures represented in the vista around him had developed weapons that could level a Punktown in one bright flash, no matter how immortal its appearance. Even turn this planet of Oasis to a charred ball. And if these lowly creatures, all more or less equivalent in their technology, could render such horror...well, what might a vastly superior race of beings be capable of?
Bell sighed the thought out of him. He wasn’t letting Kaddish distort his thoughts the way this Kate Redgrove had obviously distorted his, was he?
The current of traffic changed, and once again his Edsel was surging forward, toward Beaumonde Square, one of the nicer regions of a much blighted city. Blight was a kind word. The crime in Punktown was legendary, even an Earth. The poverty in some slums made a bygone city like Earth’s Calcutta seem tolerable. There had been riots in these streets, a devastating earthquake that had buried whole branches of the subway and the subterranean sectors of the city. And yet it still survived. Life still clung tenaciously to its streets. Again, if there could ever be a threat such as Kaddish alluded to -- a threat to the Earth, mightier still -- it would have to be a tremendously dangerous force. It would have to be something like one of those doomsday weapons. Worse, really, since even against those there were defenses and counter-measures.
A cloud with mouths. Lots of mouths. What had the Mars colonists witnessed that could be construed that way?
He drew nearer to Beaumonde Square, whose inhabitants feared changes in the stock market more than cataclysms of nature or evil gods.
His vidscreen beeped him. He reactivated it. Again, Graf was there, but looking more intense than several minutes ago.
“John -- I’ve seen the memory recording.”
“And?”
“You want to come back and see it on the spectacles, or should I play it for you now?”
“Put it on.”
“You’d better pull over first.”
Bell parked the Edsel in the lot of a library of traditional Choom design. “Go on,” he told the tech.
The film had been shot from Kaddish’s point of view, the cameras being his eyes. If he were wearing the viewer that Graf had worn to watch the recording, Bell would feel that he was experiencing these memories through his own eyes. But even watching them played out on a tiny screen, with the sounds of the city around him, it was still an unsettling experience. Doubly so, considering the owner of these memories.
Bell watched Kaddish’s hand paint the red star/eye with its pupil of flame on the apartment door. The sign of the -- what? -- Elder Gods, he had called it...
Next Kaddish extended an illegal device burglars used to defeat certain styles of locks. Bell owned one himself. Its beam cut the bolt in one silent second. The door opened.
Whirling to face Bell on the screen was the living face of Willy Pugmire. Chaos unfolded now at a dizzying speed. There was a cry of outrage transforming into a cry of fear all in one smoothly blended moment. The loud blasting of a handgun with no silencing features. Solid projectiles rather than bolts of energy found their mark. Kaddish’s obsession seemed to demand the thunder of righteousness and the spilling of sacrificial blood.
“Shit!” Bell hissed, sitting closer to the screen. “What is that?”
Pugmire had fallen, and now Kaddish was firing at something that had been obscured behind the man. Something in the center of the room...
It moved across the room, into the comer. Bell heard Kaddish roaring his own fear and outrage after his target. His bullets pursued it. And then it was gone.
Pugmire’s wife had run screaming into the kitchen. Kaddish whirled away from the corner, darted in there after her. Bell felt as if he himself shot her dead, and flinched at the reports.
Confused voices from deeper in the apartment. Two others, startled from sleep. Kaddish bolted down the hall to find them. He found them, all wide eyes in the hot flashes of gas from his gun, like deer caught in headlights. The collision of bullets with flesh and bone...
In the remaining bedroom Kaddish found the boy cowering in the closet. Kaddish pulled him out. The child didn’t have time to grab the knife that was hidden under the mattress. Bell knew about it; Kaddish hadn’t. Kaddish had been lucky.
Before he left the apartment, Kaddish sprayed the pentagram in the corner where the...hound...had vanished. As he turned for the door, holding the boy’s shirt in one fist and the gun still in the other, Kaddish’s frantic viewpoint fell on the altar. That odd black gem or carving on its fossil table. He extended the gun, pointed it at the carving, and pulled the trigger. It clicked. Empty. He had unloaded the magazine of solid projectiles into his victims, and into the corner.
Bell could hear the alarmed exclamations of neighbors. The boy struggled against Kaddish. He could not remain to reload his gun and point it at the crystal again. With his prisoner, he fled the apartment...
“End recording!” Bell blurted to the screen. Blood throbbed in his ears. “Graf, run it back again. Right after he shoots Pugmire, put the play into slowmo.”
Graf complied, and the memories unfolded once more. At the requested moment, as Pugmire went down, the recording went into slow motion. This time, Bell had a better look at the creature that was revealed behind him, seen through a spray of arterial blood. A shiver blew up through the hollows in Bell’s body.
It was the height of a man, but that was the extent of its anthropomorphic traits. The creature was torpedo-shaped, all black and rubbery, and moved across the room upright with an obscene flopping motion that might have been comical had it not been so hideous. In regular playback, the swaying from side to side had been quick but awkward, as if this was not the thing’s normal mode of locomotion, or its intended environment or medium.
Gill-like slits opened and closed on the thing’s smooth sides as if it gasped for air. In this and in its general shape, it was like a shark without fins, tail -- or head. Its means of locomotion were flippers or pseudopods at its base, with black claws curling out of them, as cruel as an eagle’s. It was these that tore the carpet as it moved. The thing had no other limbs, except for that one tentacle -- or was it a tongue? -- that lashed out of the hole in the top of its body. This opening had five flaps, a somewhat grayer color like that vaguely translucent tongue or limb that thrashed uncannily in slow motion.
And in slow motion, Kaddish’s bullets tore into the rubbery flesh of the being. A thick bluish fluid spattered out into the air and ran down its flanks, though Bell had seen no such fluid at the crime scene. Graf would have to go back to see if it had soaked thoroughly into the carpet, or evaporated totally.
In regular play, the creature had emitted short, sharp, guttural cries. Almost like barks. It was the only reason Bell could imagine for its moniker, unless its function to its masters was as some loyal animal.
In slowed play, its barks and Kaddish’s own cry were unearthly, blending together into a terrible sepulchral groan.
When the creature reached the corner, it vanished into the joining point of the walls, as if it or the walls were merely an illusion.
“Jesus,” Bell exhaled. Gone, like an apparition. An apparition that could bleed. “Graf?”
The recorded memories vanished. Graf returned. “It’s real, boss. If Kaddish was hallucinating, the hallucinations would be in his mind only. This isn’t what his mind interpreted, but the physical reality his eyes perceived.”